There have been several hundred vampire movies made over the last 90 years. The vast majority of these are uninspired clones of the archetypal blood sucker portrayed by Bela Lugosi in 1931. However, there’s a small minority of vampire flicks that are ambitious in their recipes of blood-fiend lore. Some of these movies are great, others are merely good, but all of them are unique, entertaining, and deserving recognition based on their own merits.

Here are some recommendations:

Nick Knight doesn’t sparkle, he doesn’t exude sexuality (though many of his fans seem to think so), and he doesn’t fight other unabashedly good looking werewolves. No, Nick Knight fights for his soul the old fashioned way, through solving bizarre and often Vampire centric homicides. And if you don’t know who Nick Knight is, well then you probably have had a life outside of Canadian, cult status, vampire television since before the dawn of the internet.

Forever Knight was a Canadian television series about an 800 year old vampire working as a homicide detective in the then ultra sleek and hip city of mid 90’s Toronto. His whole existence was one of self hatred and loathing, and his main goal in life seemed to be atoning for the sins he had committed throughout the centuries as he preyed on humans.

In horror circles, one of the things the last decade will be remembered for is a zombie renaissance. The walking dead have been everywhere, from the big screen to books and from comics to games. The dead literally have been taking over the world. Well, insofar as cheap entertainment is concerned. As is always the case when a niche becomes a commodity, the genre becomes oversaturated.

Director Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, the “re-imagining” of Wes Craven’s groundbreaking 1984 slasher opus, is an unfortunate inevitability. During the last several years horror fans have had little original material to enjoy within the sanctity of sticky floors, air thick with the scent of butter flavoring, and arm rests that feature cup-holders. Virtually all the major horror flicks of yesteryear and even some of the minor ones have been re-hashed over the last decade, helmed by inexperienced and thus inexpensive filmmakers, and resulting in little more than tarnished legacies. I’ve made no secret about the fact that I detest this current get-rich-quick scheme by the powers that be. Despite having well-reasoned low expectations, I was still taken aback by the level of ineptitude displayed in Platinum Dunes’ latest strip mining of pop culture’s rich dark history. If nothing else, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a worst case scenario.

I normally tackle book and RPG reviews; however, I thought I’d give a movie a shot. You may be asking yourself why this movie would even make it to a site dedicated to all things horror, but Percy Jackson fits just as easily as, say, Harry Dresden or Mercy Thompson or the many characters from the Kelley Armstrong novels. Urban fantasy is a fantastic genre, despite the fact too many authors seem to be jumping into its waters. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: the Lightning Thief may be the longest name for a movie in 2010, but it is a big movie in scope and promise.

Let me ask you a question or three; you ever watch a movie and think “Hey, isn’t this movie ripping off such and such movie?” You ever watch a film and ask yourself “Is this movie going anywhere?” And after watching a flick, do you walk away thinking “What was the freaking point of this movie?” Well my fellow legion of Da’ flames… I have the displeasure of telling you that I asked all three questions during the course of this picture, in some cases multiple times.

The poor excuse of a story goes something a little like this; god almighty above has washed his hands of the human race and he’s hiring a cleaning service to mop up the globe, namely his angels. His entire “legion” is gonna come down and lay a god sized smack down on all us mud monkeys. However, we’ve still got one angel on humanity’s shoulder that’s ready, willing and able to stand up for all of us schmucks.

Writer/director/producer Christian Petersen’s Midnight Chronicles is an indie film based on the fantasy role playing game Midnight from Fantasy Flight Games. Evil rules in Midnight’s world of Aryth after Izrador, the dark god defeated the free races in a war 100 years prior. Men are now enslaved while Elves and Dwarves have disappeared into the forests and mountains. Hope resides in only the few brave enough to pursue it. As Mag Kiln travels to Blackweir to investigate the disappearance of a fellow priest, others also descend on the small town where a complex web of good versus evil develops that has implications on the future of the dark forces that rule the land.

Thankskilling can’t be dubbed “critic proof” because its success is yet to be determined. A more accurate term to describe Kevin Stewart and Jordan Downey’s movie about a murderous turkey would be “anti-critic.” This opinion is not lost on these two upstart filmmakers. In fact, the following is an excerpt from the home page of Thankskillingmovie.com:

“ThanksKilling promises nothing but a cheesy good time. It’s the perfect cult film to watch with drinks around Halloween or especially during Thanksgiving! Laugh at it because it’s funny. Laugh at it because it’s bad. It’s meant to be taken with a grain of salt.”

I’ve been hearing about this Mayan predicted apocalypse flick called 2012 for months now. The barrage of commercials on TV and in the movie house and all the controversy on the news concerning the accuracy of the Mayan calendar has stirred up a lot of publicity… and another guaranteed box office hit in Director Roland Emmerich’s back pocket. But what I get from all this is something much more terrifying than Mayan predictions; it meant another trip to the movies with my natural disaster film obsessive wifey.

You see, I’m not a fan of all these natural disaster films that keep cropping up. In my book, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. And yet my gal can’t get enough of ‘em! Back in our “young love” days I learned early on about her second love; natural disaster films. I once had a “stay at home” date at her apartment and during a conversation I confessed that I’d never watched Armageddon.

Director Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland is not a horror movie. It’s not even a horror-comedy. It’s really a fairly straight forward comedy-comedy, the back drop of which involves zombies. And as such it works pretty well, just not as well as its components suggest it should.

The world has been overrun by zombies and a most unlikely survivor nicknamed Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is heading east across the country toward home hoping to find others, his family in particular. As fate would have it, he crosses paths with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), another survivor heading east and Columbus’ polar opposite in just about every way. Soon the two of them run into a bad girl nicknamed Wichita (Emma Stone) and her twelve year old sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). These girls were conning men out of their money before zombies became an issue and have since parlayed their game into a post apocalyptic art of survival as they head west.

When I went out to see one of this weekend’s newest box office’s offerings “9”, I knew a scarce few details about it. I knew from the trailers it was CG animated, it has robots covered in burlap bags, I knew it had something to do with a post-apocalyptic setting, I knew that the #1 fan of darkness and the macabre himself Tim Burton produced it and I knew it carried a PG-13 rating. With these details I was eager to see it, and to make sure I was covering more bases since I planned to review this flick, I brought along my fourteen year old daughter with me to get her thoughts and insights. I assumed the film might have been more aimed at an audience more her age level than my own. To a point I was right on in my assumption, but in others points I was way off.

Doing some homework after paying 9 a visit, I’ve since learned that it was based off of an 11 minute silent short from new director Shane Acker as his thesis project from his grad school days at UCLA. The short film gave the world a 3-D setting, by that I mean Dark, Desolate & Destroyed.

Review by Steven Dawes

My experience watching Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 was similar to how I imagine it must have been when George Foreman discovered he was as adept at selling grills as he was putting people to sleep with his fists. In other words, it was not what I expected. In fact I expected to hate it. I was so disgusted with Zombie’s unfortunate stab at remaking, re-imagining, and regurgitating John Carpenter’s 1978 seminal slasher that for a while I became the elderly curmudgeon of horror movie journalism. I may have even yelled at some kids to stay the hell off my lawn.

However, this time it wasn’t long before I came to the slightly confusing realization that I wasn’t hating this dreaded sequel, an emotion I felt specifically entitled to given the majority of films I’ve suffered through lately, but rather I was riveted by Rob Zombie’s brutal, gritty, and most importantly, original chapter in one of horror’s most important and longest running series.

Rocky Joe Shields dives in to District 9 for Flames Rising.

Based on the short film Alive in Joburg, District 9 is more than just a mere science fiction summer action movie. Director Neill Blomkamp has created an exciting new world; the basis for this world is an alien-landing. Called “prawns,” the aliens landed 20 years ago over the South African city of Johannesburg. In District 9, we learn what has transpired over the next 20 years through interviews filmed in a documentary style. The people of Johannesburg have had enough, and want the aliens out of their city.

The movie begins with geeky bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe, played wonderfully by newcomer Sharlto Copley, who has been assigned the task of getting the aliens to leave for District 10. Unfortunately, when Wikus comes into contact with an alien cylinder and sprays himself with the fluid inside, his DNA mutates, then turns him into one of the alien prawns.

Be it in the real world or the fiction realm there aren’t that many themes that manage to give me the creeps: it’s not that I am a particularly brave (nor picky) individual, it’s more that I am rather rational and find it difficult to empathize with other people’s irrational feelings: say Carpenter, for example, if immensely enjoyable, isn’t going to give me cold sweats. Of course, there are exceptions like social, psychedelic or metaphysical horror, especially subjects that fiddle with the notion of paradox.

I grabbed Primer in the room of my friend during an afternoon of boredom. After reading the phrase “Donnie Darko for Grown Ups” on the DVD cover, I slipped it in the DVD player. Donnie Darko has always been a mystery for me, as my opinion has conflicted with the opinion of most of my friends.

Life-hating Goth girl Lara Baxter just turned 16. Her birthday party mojo never materializes after her more popular sister, Helen, steals her thunder. Shunned by her secret crush and neglected by her own mother, Lara retreats to the sanctuary of her altar to Ann Rice where she casts a spell on Helen. The next day Helen wakes up bleeding profusely from her nose and dies a short time later.

Just as the family begins to mourn, Helen comes back from the morgue delirious and with an insatiable thirst for blood. Older brother Raymond, a cross between Re-Animator’s Dr. Herbert West and Milwaukee’s own Jeff Dahmer, performs some tests on Helen’s blood in his bedroom/laboratory and determines that she’s a vampire.

Cheerbleeders is a short horror film by Peter Podgursky, the proud owner of a MFA in Film Production from USC. In fact, these eleven minutes of cinematic fun comprised his thesis project and it has since made the rounds at several horror film fests winning best short at the Phoenix Fear Film festival 2008.

Here’s the dirt: Best friends, Penny and Devon (Laurel Vail and Wyatt Fenner), are high school misfits in Blackfoot, Idaho – a tiny and isolated burg. When Penny brings an ancient urn to class, it accidentally spills its black slimy contents on Devon. This black sludge is essentially a gnarly love potion, turning him into…gasp…the most popular kid at school! Drunk with power, Devon holds sway over everyone, including the cheerleading squad, which he commands to massacre the football team, midgame. Can Penny stop the insidious evil known as unrestrained adolescent popularity?

Not too long ago I would’ve decorated my kitchen with Evil Dead wallpaper had such a product been available. I was fully prepared to name my first born child Ash and the thought of having a chainsaw-enhanced appendage didn’t seem all that bad to me.

Then Sam Raimi made three underwhelming Spiderman movies and I managed to get married. These events ushered in a new, more restrained era in my life and I agreed to relinquish both the home decorating and child naming duties. I also grew bored with Sam Raimi as a filmmaker. I got through it mainly by buying approximately 17 versions of each Evil Dead movie on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray. It’s obvious that those in the Home Video racket understand there are suckers out there like me, so why not release these movies incessantly and with slightly different packaging? I’ll buy them. But I digress.

Always treat others how you like to be treated, or else you will get a sinister Gypsy curse placed upon you. Within 3 days your life turns to hell, and then you go to there.

The movie tells the story of Christine (Lohman), a young loan officer who is struggling to get a promotion at her bank. She faces stiff competition from Stu (Reggie Lee), a conniving trainee who wants the same assistant manager position Christine wants. When the opportunity comes to make a decision that will help her career, she decides to foreclose on Mrs. Ganush’s house. Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) believes Christine has shamed her by refusing to help her keep her home, and stalks Christine to her car. After an over the top fight scene involving car crashes, a fist fight involving office equipment, and a vicious gumming at the hands of Mrs. Ganush (you read that right), she places a curse upon Christine, calling on the Lamia to exact her revenge.

Review by John D. Kennedy

It’s no secret I’m a fan of the Hellboy franchise, so when I found out that Doug Jones (Abe Sapien) was acting in a new series called Angel Of Death, I was pretty excited about it. Then I found out that the series is not your full-length, standard fare — they’re webisodes offered for free on www.crackle.com, a venture by entertainment giant Sony.

Created by comic industry veteran Ed Brubaker, Angel Of Death is a series starring Zoe Bell. Zoe plays a character named “Eve,” a brutal assassin who starts off the series with very little humanity. The first episode introduces us to her deadly world — a world so messed up that she accidentally kills a little girl. The series explores Zoe’s character in full detail, to explore whether or not she’s truly an assassin without a conscious. Instead of following orders from her boss “aka lover” Graham, she’s gone renegade to do the bidding of a very unhappy ghost. Does her victim haunt her? Or did the knife that was stuck in Zoe’s brain have some kind of an effect on her?

Anime has come a long way since Astroboy and Voltron, as is evidenced by even the merest glimpse of Ergo Proxy. This visual delight, though perhaps not the latest, is – in this reviewer’s opinion – one of the greatest anime series to come out in recent history.

Delightfully dark, Ergo Proxy revolves around two main characters: Re-l Mayer and Vincent Law. Re-l, privileged Citizen and Security Bureau member of the post-apocalyptic eden-dome of Romdo, becomes rapidly obsessed with a bizarre series of murders committed by AutoReiv androids.

Review by Aly Condon